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Alabama chief justice makes last stand against gay marriage

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore has followed in former governor George Wallace’s footsteps as a holdout against the inevitable.

Kim Gebauer, left, and Regina Gebauer both of Daphne, Ala., get married in a double wedding with Peggy Belcher, second from right, and her partner Louise Lynn, both of Mobile, Ala., at Government Plaza in Mobile, Ala., on Thursday. (Sharon Steinmann / AP)

WASHINGTON—Tim Roth played segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in
Selma
. Roy Moore is playing Wallace in real life.

Moore, Alabama’s elected chief justice, was known as “the Ten Commandments judge” even before his 2003 refusal to comply with a federal court’s order to remove a 5,280-pound granite monument to God he installed in the state’s judicial building in the middle of the night.

He is now carving out a new legacy: the last powerful American jurist to take a stand against same-sex marriage.

The battle is all over but the kissing. Gay couples can already get married in 36 other states, the
Supreme Court
is generally expected to rule in favour of a national right to same-sex marriage later this year, and a federal judge struck down Alabama’s ban in late January.

Moore, though, managed to create mass confusion by following in Wallace’s footsteps as a vocal holdout against the inevitable. On Sunday, a day before same-sex marriages were supposed to begin in the deeply conservative state, he ordered the state probate judges who issue marriage licences not to comply with the federal judge’s ruling.

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He argued, yet again, that federal judges can’t tell state judges what to do. Some legal experts believe he was not entirely wrong on the technical merits of the particular case in question. But Moore has made no effort to conceal his real motivations.

In voting to deny custody to a lesbian mother in 2002 — in favour of an abusive father — Moore wrote that homosexual behaviour is “a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.”

An ethics panel kicked him out of office in 2003 over his unwillingness to comply with the federal court’s order to dispose of the Ten Commandments monument. He won his seat back in 2012, claiming on the campaign trail that “same-sex marriage will be the ultimate destruction of our country.”

During his media blitz this week, he handed a New York Times reporter a booklet titled, “One Nation Under God.” He also told CNN he would try to thwart same-sex marriage in Alabama even if the Supreme Court deemed it a constitutional right.

“We had no doubt that he was going to raise a stink and make a fuss about things. It’s just in his nature,” Brittney Barnett, secretary on the executive board of Central Alabama Pride, said in an interview Friday. “He’s a grandstander. He wanted to get on the news. And there he goes.”

A second order by the federal judge, on Thursday, eased the concerns of judges who had been reluctant to defy Moore. By Friday, 50 of the state’s 67 probate judges were issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, according to the advocacy group Freedom to Marry.

So far, at least, Moore has not attempted a courthouse recreation of Wallace’s infamous 1963 “stand in the schoolhouse door,” when the governor physically impeded the enrolment of black students at the University of Alabama. But his words this week carry strong echoes of Wallace’s, said Ronald Krotoszynski, a professor at the university’s law school.

“Denouncing things like ‘judicial tyranny’ is straight from George Wallace’s playbook. Those words, in fact, are identical to those used by George Wallace,” Krotoszynski said.

Alabama is not the Alabama of old. Wallace, Krotoszynski said, had views no different than those of other state officials. This time around, the governor has declined to join Moore in trying to thwart the federal order. About a third of state probate judges were already issuing licenses to same-sex couples, in defiance of Moore, before the federal judge’s second ruling.

“Chief Justice Moore does not seem to have a lot of friends at the moment,” Krotoszynski said.

Even in Alabama, views on homosexuality have evolved rapidly. Eighty-one per cent of voters endorsed a 2006 constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In a 2014 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, opposition to same-sex marriage was down to 59 per cent — still the lowest level of support in the U.S., but evidence of a significant shift.

“I used to know a time that it wasn’t okay to be seen in any sort of public place, even in Birmingham — unless you were in a gay venue — with your significant other. And it’s just not like that anymore,” Barnett said.

“There’s just places where you’re going to get looks, but you don’t worry that anything’s going to happen.”

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